Text without Context: On Bloom's Misreading of J

Text without Context: On Bloom's Misreading of JAuthor(s): Carol MeyersSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Fall, 1991), pp. 60-65Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20153168 .

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Text without Context:

On Bloom's Misreading of J

Carol Meyers

On the second day of the Gulf War, the chief science editor of the New

York Times called. He wanted to know the exact location of the Garden of

Eden for a piece he was preparing on the air war in Iraq and its affect on

antiquities sites. I was impressed that he was checking out his story with

someone who is supposed to know something about the Bible and about

archaeological remains. And I was even more impressed when, after a

forty-five-minute conversation about the imagery of paradisiacal gardens and the trans-historical complexities of early biblical traditions, he scratched

the story. A consummate master of his own profession, he recognized that

his interest in Eden meant stepping into the difficult terrain of another dis

cipline; he wisely backed away.

Not so Rosenberg and Bloom. They have been unwilling to recognize

that the Bible is not user friendly. Though they would distance themselves

from believers who hold that scripture is the revealed word of God, they share with the faithful the notion that the Bible is accessible to all who

would leaf through its pages. Because biblical allusions, characters, and

language are so much a part of contemporary western culture, it seems

that the holy text itself is of this time. Well, in some ways it is. Yet it is

also radically distant and other, a product of a time and a place so removed

from our own world that we would suffer severe culture shock were we to

be plunked down in a mountain village in Palestine of three millennia ago.

Perhaps Bloom's greatest contribution to naive and even sophisticated Bible readers who are swept away by his innovative readings of the first

great masterpiece of western literature is his insistence that the literary

power and originality of one of the earliest narrative strands of the Bible

has been occluded by subsequent layers of tradition. These layers include

the very material that surrounds it ? the other narrative strands that sup

plement it, amplify it, and in so doing presumably violate some earlier

authorial integrity. The J narrative comes to us with its edges blurred and

its own story incomplete. If it is a reality at all, and not a theoretical fig

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ment of the imagination of generations of Bible scholars and of the auda

cious analysis of Bloom, its original form can never be recovered, unless

some miracle of archaeology produce an Urtext of J's full creation.

Those early canonical layerings that obscure J's art are just the begin

ning of the historic misreadings to which the J source and the other liter

ary monuments of the Pentateuch have been subjected. For millennia the

Bible has been the provenance of believers and their interpretations. And

for more than a century it has been territory for countless scholarly treks

by both academics and clerics. The artful originality of the Bible and its

foundational amalgam of radical messages giving life to a tiny community

precariously perched amidst giants have been swallowed up and disguised

by post-biblical critics who have been too often guided by their own con

texts than by the very texts that start them on their journeys of belief and

of scholarship. Yes indeed the Bible has been misread. And we all suffer the conse

quences of the misreadings; for politicians and theologians alike use their

versions of scriptural passages to justify policies and theologies that are all

too unbiblical. Both those who uphold the privileged place of scripture and

those who would distance themselves from it are trapped by the distortions

of centuries of misreadings. If Bloom can rescue us from those mistaken vi

sions of the biblical truths, then he would be as liberating of the mind as

Yahweh was liberating of the ancient community of Israelites. Still, Bloom

is hardly the first to signal the misapprehension of scripture by the many

layers of commentary; some extremely cogent critiques of biblical scholar

ship (such as Robert Oden's The Bible without Theology [San Francisco:

Harper and Row, 1987] ) have unmasked, for example, the dark power of

nineteenth- and twentieth-century German Christianity in its shaping of

contemporary biblical studies.

But the authors of those critiques do not have the audience that Bloom

enjoys. While they may influence their fellow academicians, who may ulti

mately, over many decades, reshape general cultural attitudes, that process

is painfully slow, indirect, and ponderous. And perhaps it will not ever

happen. The wider world of Bible readers needs a jolt to its somnolent

accession to traditional readings. The Book ofj provides such a jolt. It shocks

us into questioning what has been beyond question. But there the value of

Bloom's courageous proclamation that layers of tradition have occluded

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our vision of the precious core (which, ironically, the blurring processes of

tradition have sought to preserve and sustain) unfortunately ends.

Bloom's work itself, as he of course admits, becomes the latest in a mil

lennia-long series of misreadings. He has stepped into the unfamiliar

world of an ancient Semitic text, where he has deliberately and eloquently used the critical tools honed on his eminent work on masterpieces of Eng lish literature. In so doing he has superimposed a post-biblical, non

Hebraic literary mind-set upon the otherness of the Hebraic world. Such

an exercise is not impossible. But it is lethal to the social and artistic inven

tions of the underlying terrain to ignore the complex features of that land

scape. In virtually ignoring the world ofj, as it existed beyond the walls of

her palatial Jerusalem villa restored by Bloom's cunning?admittedly without a shred of reliable evidence ?he, no less than the scholars and

sages he berates, has failed his readers. Bloom has given us a text without a

context. He thereby deludes us, and he also deprives us of what J meant

for the earthly and heavenly contours of ancient Israel.

Biblical scholarship strives to recover context, so that the story ofj and

of all other anonymous biblical authors, along with the few with names,

can be heard as they were meant to be heard. Bloom has given lip service to

that scholarship, though strangely he has relied most often on precisely those German Protestant scholars whose heavily theological approaches he

would most eschew. But he cannot possibly have acquired, in however

many months or years he devoted to preparing The Book ofj, the depth and familiarity patiently acquired by those who have dedicated their grad uate studies and professional careers to biblical studies. He has not recov

ered the context of J's materials, and so he has made assertions that under

mine much of his argument about J's God, about J's understanding of

humanity, and about J's gender. Let us look at an example of each of these

three facets of Bloom's work.

Who is this Yahweh that is the protagonist of J's work and who is clearly of great concern for Bloom's quest? Bloom shakes Yahweh loose from

rabbinic and patristic theologies. So far so good. But what do we see

instead? What Bloom does with the first scene makes us question what he

does with all subsequent ones. Our first glimpse of J's Yahweh is at the

moment of creation, that sublime, earth-centered, human-centered

moment of beginnings. But the image of Yahweh Bloom gives us is that

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of a child playing in the mud, randomly making objects out of the wet

clay. Can the beginnings of human life be that devoid of design in J's per

ception? Bloom has drawn a contrast between the Yahweh of Genesis 2 and

something he has read about deity-as-potter in the ancient Near East. That

metaphor indeed exists; but it does not fit the scene of Genesis 2 as Bloom

correctly points out. Potters at their wheels made utilitarian vessels. Yah

weh makes a human being. But rather than engaging in child's play, Yah

weh thereby stands in the tradition of coroplasts, whose very craft may have originated in Bible lands and whose artistic accomplishments stand

out among the plastic arts of the ancient east Mediterranean world. Yah

weh formed the clay according to the coroplast's mode, with artful intent.

The vitality of human life thereby is an extension of divine creative pur

pose rather than a sign of impishness. This image is a far cry from the Yah

weh depicted by Bloom at the first and that thus underlies all that follows.

If we cannot trust what Bloom gives us at the first, how can we take seri

ously all that follows? Yahweh is to be known by deeds, and the dynamism of Yahweh's inter

action with the Israelite forebears speaks volumes about the essence of this

god. But we miss the startling and momentous implications of this god by not seeing how this bestower of the Blessing, this one who saves oppressed

peoples, was a new thing on earth. J's originality in a literary sense

bespeaks the radical originality of the god who, intertwined with early individuals of Hebrew history, is the power that generates the text. If J did

not see such an extraordinary Yahweh, she would not, could not, have

devised such an extraordinarily engaging portrayal of cosmic, human, and

Hebrew beginnings.

J's work needs to be read as a Beginnings tale, set over and against the

cosmogonies of other ancient peoples, more than it needs to be read

through the eyes of Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, more than it needs to

be seen against the achievements of Shakespeare and Milton. The problem is that the sort of context that will illuminate J's contribution on an ideo

logical as well as literary level is not so accessible as is Mann or Milton.

One needs to know long-dead and difficult writing systems and litera

tures, apparently quite beyond the reach of a mature critic of western lit

erature.

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Bloom's somewhat sarcastic treatment of the scholarship on J's anthropo

morphic rendering of Yahweh is similarly founded on assumptions that

may not be valid for an ancient Semitic text. We are told that J's Yahweh

is the "uncanniest of all Western metaphors" (15), but we are left woe

fully ignorant of the function of metaphors in Semitic, pre-western con

structions. To be sure, western modes of thought emerge from Near East

ern antiquity. But they have been significantly altered by transmission

through the Greco-Roman world. And the alterity of Semitic modes of

perceiving and expressing reality is critical to comprehending the biblical

portrayals of Yahweh. The imagery of Yahweh's human-like behavior is

not a literal delineation nor an allegorical rendering. It is a highly poetic

way of communicating abstract thought. Once Greek philosophy was

superimposed on the Hebraic tradition, the subtle genius of such expres

sion began to appear irrational and fanciful. The special qualities of mytho

poetic thought devoted to the pondering of cosmic and community begin

nings are lost to us if we look at J's work only in relation to the pinnacles of western literature from the Greeks onward.

Next, what about J's view of humanity? I take only one example, one

to which I have given considerable attention in my own work. Like

Bloom, I am interested in seeing the text without the accretions, and I

have worked especially hard to see the Eden of Gen. 2:46-3:24 and to

understand Eve's role in J's creation. But, looking at Rosenberg's chapters 1-10 and Bloom's comments on them, I see something that diverges from

what the Hebrew proclaims. This is especially true for a verse that has pro

foundly influenced western attitudes toward women: the one that is

believed by many to be Yahweh's mandate for women to experience pain in childbirth.

Rosenberg has mutilated this text (Book ofj 8; Gen. 3:16), giving us

words and concepts of which the Hebrew is devoid ?no bellies or male

eagerness there. But especially no "pain." The Hebrew word so rendered

is another marvelous pun ?it is the same Hebrew word as that denoting the man's fate, his hard and unremitting "toil" in the unyielding highlands of his future homeland. Even an aristocratic J would have seen that a

woman's lot involved hard work, as did that of a man, in addition to many

pregnancies. How else could Israelites survive in the marginal environ

ment of the Palestinian hills? But neither Bloom nor Rosenberg have

worked to see that context. And instead they perpetuate a mentality under

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which women have suffered for millennia. J's Yahweh did not give women

pain as they created their future; Yahweh gave them a life of hard work

that even a noblewoman in Jerusalem could memorialize in her use of this

poetic fragment portraying the human condition.

Now, how can we respond to what Bloom understands as J's gender? He prods us with this notion; and he prizes its outrageousness. But the

audacity of crediting the masterpiece of J to a woman's hand is merely a

reflection of his acceptance of the very post-biblical layering to which he

objects. That is, only an androcentric and patriarchalizing reading of

J ?which is precisely what tradition has provided?could lead us to believe

that the incomparability of scripture could not have been generated in part

by a woman's spirit. The proposition that such was indeed the case is

viewed as shocking only if one's angle of vision is so patriarchally slanted

that a female cannot be unremarkably seen as the author of such a sublime

tale.

It is an open question as to whether women were deemed inferior, sec

ondary, and otherwise incapable of high art in Israelite antiquity. Most

likely such rigid stances are largely post-biblical. Bloom is peering at

Israelite society through Miltonian hierarchical lenses. He has cast off

other accretions but not this one.

The fact that J's women are so sympathetically drawn, that they appear resolute and heroic in achieving the continuity of the Blessing, may not be

a result of a female's predilection but rather a reflection of a reality. In the

formative struggles of the Israelites to root themselves in Canaan, to com

bat the forces of death that beset them on all sides in the inhospitable hill

top villages of their homeland, female tenacity, diplomacy, and fecundity did much to sustain them. Whether J was a woman or not, the family

story that J was moved to tell demanded a heightened portrayal of the

women whose vitality of spirit and body gave life to the story, to the

people, and to the god symbolizing the successful urge to life.

By making the suggestion that J was a woman seem outrageous, the

very generosity of female wills and wiles depicted by J is mocked. If that is what female authorship ofj entails, we would all be better served by posit

ing male imagination as the generative force behind this or any other of

the truly great biblical writings. But if we can shed all misreadings, including those of Bloom and Rosenberg, then perhaps the unbounded

creativity of female contributions to literature and life can be recognized.

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Documents

Text without Context: On Bloom's Misreading of J